Pashto

Introduction

The Pashto language (also known as Pashtu) is used in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a handful of other countries. It is written using a form of Arabic script.

Several letters specific to Pashto were added to the Persian script, which itself is an adaptation of Arabic script.

Arabic script is written from right-to-left but numbers are written from left-to-right. Numerals vary by language and Unicode has set aside two ranges for Arabic script numbers: "Arabic-Indic digits" (U+0660 - U+0669) for use with the Arabic language and "Eastern Arabic-Indic digits" (U+06F0 - U+06F9) for use with all other languages that employ Arabic script.

Since Arabic script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its context/position: isolated, initial (joined on the left), medial (joined on both sides), and final (joined on the right). Arabic codepoints in the U+0600 - U+06FF range represent all of the letters without regard to their position. It is up to the font to show the letter with the proper appearance. For compatibility with existing standards, Unicode also defined codepoints with explicit positions for most letters (ARABIC PRESENTATION FORMS-A & -B), although use of these characters is discouraged. Likewise, explicit ligatures are also encoded in the PRESENTATION blocks.